Browse our collection books, music, articles, and other resources on Mississippian society and its hometown blues musicians.
Chess Box by
Spoonful (Howlin' Wolf, vocal). You know my love (Otis Rush, vocal, guitar). You can't judge a book by its cover (Bo Diddley, vocal, guitar). I ain't superstitious (Howlin' Wolf, vocal, guitar). You need love (Muddy Waters, vocal). Little red rooster (Howlin' Wolf, vocal, guitar). Back door man (Howlin' Wolf, vocal). Dead Presidents (Little Walter, vocal, harmonica). Hidden charms (Howlin' Wolf, vocal). You shook me (Muddy Waters, vocal). Bring it on home (Sonny Boy Williamson, vocal, harmonica). 300 pounds of joy (Howlin' Wolf, vocal). Weak brain, narrow mind (Willie Dixon, vocal, guitar). Wang dang doodle (Koko Taylor, vocal). The same thing (Muddy Waters/Fathers and Sons). Built for comfort (Howlin' Wolf, vocal). I can't quit you baby (Little Milton, vocal, guitar). Insane asylum (Koko Taylor, vocal).
1928 Session by
Ain't no tellin' -- Stack O' Lee blues -- Candy man blues -- Spike driver blues -- Avalon blues -- Louis Collins -- Frankie -- Big leg blues --Nobody's dirty business -- Got the blues, can't be satisfied -- Blessed be the name -- Blue harvest blues -- Praying on the old camp ground.
Muddy Waters live, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA, Nov. 04-06 1966 by
11/05/1966: Forty days and forty nights ; (I'm your) Hoochie coochie man ; Rock me ; Baby please don't don't ; She moves me ; Got my mojo working -- 11/06/1966: You can't lose what you ain't never had ; Forty days and forty nights ; Baby please don't go ; Thirteen highway ; Rock me -- 11/04/1966: Honey bee (a/k/a Sail on) ; Trouble no more ; (I'm your) Hoochie coochie man ; Long distance call.
John Lee Hooker: The Ultimate Collection 1948-1990 by
Disc 1. Teachin' the blues -- Boogie chillen' -- Sally Mae -- Let your daddy ride -- Crawlin' king snake -- Weeping willow boogie -- Hobo blues -- Huckle up baby -- I'm in the mood -- John L's house rent boogie -- No more doggin' -- I need some money -- Frisco blues -- Dimples -- It serves me right -- Bottle up and go.
Disc 2. Boom boom -- Big legs, tight skirt -- You know, I know -- One bourbon, one scotch, one beer -- Let's go out tonight -- I cover the waterfront -- She's mine (keep your hands to yourself) -- Back biters and syndicators -- think twice before you go -- Shake it baby -- I'm bad like Jesse James -- Peavine -- Burning hell -- Terraplane blues -- I'm in the mood.
Son House: Delta Blues by
Delta blues -- Government fleet blues -- Walking blues -- Shetland pony blues -- Levee camp blues -- Special rider blues -- Low down dirty dog blues -- Depot blues -- American defence -- Am I right or wrong -- Walking blues -- Country farm blues -- The pony blues -- The jinx blues -- The jinx blues.
Paul Williams and Friends: In Memory of Robert Johnson
Terraplane blues (version one) -- Crossroads blues -- Kind hearted woman blues -- If I had possession over judgement day -- Rambling blues -- When you got a good friend -- Come on in my kitchen -- Terraplane blues (version two)
Willie's Blues by
Nervous (3:15) -- Good understanding (2:15) -- That's my baby (3:22) -- Slim's thing (3:24) -- That's all I want baby (2:15) -- Don't you tell nobody (2:09) -- Youth to you (3:24) -- Sittin' and cryin' the blues (3:23) -- Built for comfort (2:32) -- I got a razor (4:14) -- Go easy (5:52) -- Move me (3:20).
Legend by 
Muddy Waters, the definitive collection by
I can't be satisfied -- I feel like going home -- Rollin' & tumblin' (Part 1) -- Rollin' stone -- Louisiana blues -- Long distance call -- Still a fool -- Turn your lamp down low (Baby please don't go) -- (I'm your) Hoochie coochie man -- I just want to make love to you -- I'm ready -- Mannish boy -- Trouble no more -- Forty days and forty nights -- Don't go no farther -- Got my mojo working -- Rock me -- Walkin' thru the park -- Take the bitter with the sweet -- You shook me -- My home is in the Delta -- The same thing -- You can't lose what you ain't never had -- Crosseyed cat.
Hellhounds on my trail the afterlife of Robert Johnson
Heartfelt tribute to the influential and legendary bluesman Robert Johnson. Includes commentary about the man and his music, along with musical performances which took place in Cleveland, Ohio during a week long group of events dedicated to the artist.
I am the blues by 
Robert Johnson Complete by
(Piano/Vocal/Guitar Artist Songbook). Our first piano/vocal/guitar collection for the songs of this blues legend! Including 29 classics: Come On in My Kitchen * Cross Road Blues (Crossroads) * Dead Shrimp Blues * Drunken Hearted Man * Hell Hound on My Trail * I Believe I'll Dust My Broom * Kind Hearted Woman Blues * Me and the Devil Blues * Ramblin' on My Mind * Sweet Home Chicago * Terraplane Blues * When You Got a Good Friend * and more.
Willie Dixon - Master Blues Composer by
Dixon, renowned blues bassist and composer, is the most covered blues artist in the world. This unique folio features songs from The Chess Box Collection plus hits as recorded by Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stones, The Doors, ZZ Top, and more. It also features Willie's personal notes and lyrics for each song with photos, and an introduction by Don Snowden. Over 40 transcriptions feature the most popular version (or versions) of Dixon's work, including: Back Door Man * Evil (Is Going On) * I Can't Quit You Baby * I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man * Little Red Rooster * and more!
Masters of Country Blues Guitar by
Transcriptions in notation and tablature plus the original recordings of classic blues by Mississippi John Hurt. Titles include: Shake That Thing * Casey Jones * Got the Blues, Can't Be Satisfied * Nobody's Dirty Business * Avalon Blues * See See Rider * Stack O'Lee Blues. Original recordings included on the CDs.
Muddy Waters - Deep Blues by
(Guitar Recorded Versions). 30 tunes: Evil * Got My Mojo Working * Honey Bee * I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man * more.
B. B. King by
(Signature Licks Guitar). Learn the trademark styles and techniques of the most celebrated guitarist in blues! This book/online audio pack by Wolf Marshall is a breakdown of B.B. King's guitar style, sound and techniques, with a brief history and lessons for each piece. Covers 16 signature blues tunes, including: Beautician Blues * Five Long Years * Just Like a Woman * Riding with the King * Rock Me Baby * Sweet Sixteen * Three O'Clock Blues * The Thrill Is Gone * Why I Sing the Blues * You Upset Me Baby * and more! Audio is accessed online using the unique code inside the book and can be streamed or downloaded. The audio files include PLAYBACK+, a multi-functional audio player that allows you to slow down audio without changing pitch, set loop points, change keys, and pan left or right.
John Lee Hooker - A Blues Legend by
(Guitar Recorded Versions). A classic collection of 20 songs from this legendary blues guitarist, including: Boom Boom * It Serves Me Right to Suffer * Louise * One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer * and many more.
The Fire This Time by
In this bestselling, widely lauded collection, Jesmyn Ward gathers our most original thinkers and writers to speak on contemporary racism and race, including Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Young, Claudia Rankine, and Honoree Jeffers. "An absolutely indispensable anthology" (Booklist, starred review), The Fire This Time shines a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestles with our current predicament, and imagines a better future. Envisioned as a response to The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin's groundbreaking 1963 essay collection, these contemporary writers reflect on the past, present, and future of race in America. We've made significant progress in the fifty-odd years since Baldwin's essays were published, but America is a long and painful distance away from a "post-racial society"--a truth we must confront if we are to continue to work towards change. Baldwin's "fire next time" is now upon us, and it needs to be talked about; The Fire This Time "seeks to place the shock of our own times into historical context and, most importantly, to move these times forward" (Vogue).
As I Lay Dying by
A true 20th-century classic: Faulkner's famed harrowing account of the Bundren family's odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others, the novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. "I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall." --William Faulkner on As I Lay Dying This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.
Light in August by
One of William Faulkner's most admired and accessible novels, Light in August reveals the great American author at the height of his powers. Lena Grove's resolute search for the father of her unborn child begets a rich, poignant, and ultimately hopeful story of perseverance in the face of mortality. It also acquaints us with several of Faulkner's most unforgettable characters, including the Reverend Gail Hightower, plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen, and Joe Christmas, a ragged, itinerant soul obsessed with his mixed-race ancestry. Powerfully entwining these characters' stories, Light in August brings to life Faulkner's imaginary South, one of literature's great invented landscapes, in all of its unerringly fascinating glory. Along with a new Foreword by C. E. Morgan, this edition reproduces the corrected text of Light in August as established in 1985 by Faulkner expert Noel Polk.
The Sound and the Fury by
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character's voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner's masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
Go down, Moses by
Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight.
The Faulkner reader: selections from the works of William Faulkner by
Nobel prize address -- The Sound and fury -- The Bear (Go down, Moses) -- Old man (The Wild palms) -- Spotted horses (The Hamlet) -- A rose for Emily -- Barn burning -- Dry September -- That evening sun -- Turnabout -- Shingles for the Lord -- A justice -- Wash -- An odor of verbena (The Unvanquished) -- Percy Grimm (Light in August) -- The Courthouse (Requiem for a nun)
William Faulkner by
-- User's guide -- Biography of the short story writer -- List of characters in each story -- Detailed thematic analysis of each short story -- Extracts from major critical essays that discuss important aspects of each work -- A complete bibliography of the writer's works -- A list of critical works about the short stories covered in the book -- An index of themes and ideas in the author's work
One Writer's Beginnings by
Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. In a "continuous thread of revelation" she sketches her autobiography and tells us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing. Homely and commonplace sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father's coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that become a metaphor for her mother's sturdy independence, Eudora's earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture. She has recreated this vanished world with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction. Even if Eudora Welty were not a major writer, her description of growing up in the South--of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the public they taught--would he notable. That she is a splendid writer of fiction gives her own experience a family likeness to others in the generation of young Southerners that produced a literary renaissance. Until publication of this book, she had discouraged biographical investigations. It undoubtedly was not easy for this shy and reticent lady to undertake her own literary biography, to relive her own memories (painful as well as pleasant), to go through letters and photographs of her parents and grandparents. But we are in her debt, for the distillation of experience she offers us is a rare pleasure for her admirers, a treat to everyone who loves good writing and anyone who is interested in the seeds of creativity.
Eudora Welty: Complete Novels by
Welty explores the complex abundance of southern, and particularly Southern women's, lives with an artistry that Salman Rushdie has called "impossible to overpraise." In a career spanning five decades, she chronicled her own Mississippi with a depth and intensity matched only by William Faulkner.
Eudora Welty by
This research and study guide is ideal as an introduction to the featured author. Covering four to six short stories, critical analysis of each work is offered with a variety of viewpoints by different critics.'
Black Boy (American Hunger) by
Black Boy is a classic of American autobiography, a subtly crafted narrative of Richard Wright' s journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. An enduring story of one young man' s coming off age during a particular time and place, Black Boy remains a seminal text in our history about what it means to be a man, black, and Southern in America.
Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright by
After the Second World War Gertrude Stein asked a friend's support in securing a visa for Richard Wright to visit Paris. ""I've got to help him, she said. You see, we are both members of a minority group."" The brief, little-noted friendship of Stein and Wright began in 1945 with a letter. Over the next fifteen months, the two kept up a lively correspondence which culminated in Wright's visit to Paris in May 1946 and ended with Stein's death a few months later. Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright began their careers as marginals within marginalized groups, and their desire to live peacefully in unorthodox marriages led them away from America and into permanent exile in France. Still the obvious differences between them-in class, ethnic and racial origins, and in artistic expression-beg the question: What was there to talk about? This question opens a window onto each writer's meditations on the influence of racial, ethnic, national origins on the formation of identity in a modern and post-modern world. The intuitive and intellectual affinities between Stein and Wright are illuminated in several works of non-fiction. Stein's Paris France and Wright's Pagan Spain are meditations on expatriation and creativity. Their so-called homecoming narratives-Stein's Everybody's Autobiography and Wright's Black Power --examine concepts of racial and national identity in a post-modernist world. Respectively in Lectures in America and White Man, Listen! Stein and Wright outline the ways in which the poetics and politics of modernism are inextricably bound. At the close of the twentieth century the meditations of Stein and Wright on the protean quality of individual identity and its artistic, social, and political expression explore the most prescient and pressing issues of our time and beyond.
The Jacksonian by
In The Jacksonian, Beth Henley returns to the Southern Gothic storytelling that made her reputation with both critics and audiences. Set in a seedy motel in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, the play centers around Rosy, a troubled teenager, and Bill, her dentist father who has been living at the motel for several months as his wife, Susan, considers the disgrace of divorce. Fred, the motel bartender, and Eva, a waitress, are locked in a gruesome pact: he'll marry her if she agrees to help him evade punishment for a hideous crime. But Bill, turning to nitrous oxide to ease the pain of his life collapsing around him, is a convenient target for Eva's desperate desire for companionship. At the height of the violence associated with the civil rights movement, these characters gradually reveal the shameful secrets and psychological turmoil just beneath the surface of their insistent Southern gentility.
Spring Storm by
When Tennessee Williams read Spring Storm aloud to his playwriting class at the University of Iowa in 1938, he was met with silence and embarrassment. His professor, the renowned E. C. Mabie, remarked as he got up and dismissed the seminar, "Well, we all have to paint our nudes!" Tom's earlier comment in his journal that the play "is well-constructed, no social propaganda, and is suitable for the commercial stage" seems accurate enough in 1999, but woefully naive deep in the Depression when the play's sexual explicitness--particularly its matter-of-fact acceptance of a woman's right to her own sexuality--would have been seen as not only shocking but also politically radical. Spring Storm would later be disavowed by the author as "simply a study of Sex--a blind animal urge or force (like the regenerative force of April) gripping four lives and leading them into a tangle of cruel and ugly relations." But the solid and deft characterizations of the four young people whose lives intertwine--the sexually alive Heavenly Critchfield, her earthy lover Dick Miles, Heavenly's wealthy but tongue-tied admirer Arthur Shannon, and the repressed librarian Hertha Nielson who loves Arthur--are archetypes of characters we will meet again and again in the Williams canon. Epic in scope, a bit melodramatic in execution, tragic in outcome, Spring Storm created a wave of excitement among theatre insiders when it was given a staged reading at The Ensemble Studio Theatre's Octoberfest '96. This edition has been prepared, with an illuminating introduction, by Dan Isaac, who initiated the Octoberfest production.
Robert Johnson by
"One of America's most respected authorities on the blues delves deeply into the recorded legacy of Robert Johnson, transcribing each of his songs with dedicated accuracy and distilling the meaning of every sound and phrase."
Delta Blues by
The blues grew out of the plantations and prisons, the swampy marshes and fertile cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. With original research and keen insights, Ted Gioia--the author of a landmark study of West Coast jazz and the critically acclaimed The History of Jazz--brings to life the stirring music of the Delta, evoking the legendary figures who shaped its sound and ethos: Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, and others. Tracing the history of the Delta blues from the field hollers and plantation music of the nineteenth century to the exploits of modern-day musicians in the Delta tradition, Delta Blues tells the full story of this timeless and unforgettable music. No cultural force boasts such humble origins or such world-conquering reverberations. In this evocative rags-to-riches tale, Gioia shows how the sounds of the Delta altered the course of popular music in America and in the world beyond.
Give My Poor Heart Ease by
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, folklorist William Ferris toured his home state of Mississippi, documenting the voices of African Americans as they spoke about and performed the diverse musical traditions that form the authentic roots of the blues. Now, Give My Poor Heart Ease puts front and center a searing selection of the artistically and emotionally rich voices from this invaluable documentary record. Illustrated with Ferris's photographs of the musicians and their communities and including a CD of original music, the book features more than twenty interviews relating frank, dramatic, and engaging narratives about black life and blues music in the heart of the American South. Here are the stories of artists who have long memories and speak eloquently about their lives, blues musicians who represent a wide range of musical traditions--from one-strand instruments, bottle-blowing, and banjo to spirituals, hymns, and prison work chants. Celebrities such as B. B. King and Willie Dixon, along with performers known best in their neighborhoods, express the full range of human and artistic experience--joyful and gritty, raw and painful. In an autobiographical introduction, Ferris reflects on how he fell in love with the vibrant musical culture that was all around him but was considered off limits to a white Mississippian during a troubled era. This magnificent volume illuminates blues music, the broader African American experience, and indeed the history and culture of America itself.
I Am the Blues by
These are just a few of Willie Dixon's contributions to blues, R&B, and rock'n'roll--songs performed by artists as varied as the Rolling Stones, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, ZZ Top, the Doors, Sonny Boy Williamson, the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, Megadeth, Eric Clapton, Let Zepplin, Tesla, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Jeff Healey.I Am the Blues captures Willie Dixon's inimitable voice and character as he tells his life story: the segregation of Visksburg Mississippi, where Dixon grew up; the prison farm from which he escaped and then hoboed his way north as a teenager; his equal-rights-based draft refusal in 1942; his work--as songwriter bassist, producer, and arranger--with Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry which shaped the definitive Chicago blues sound of Chess Records; and his legal battles to recapture the rights to his historic catalog of songs.
Blues from the Delta by 
The Land Where the Blues Began by
Lomax, who has done more than anyone else to make black music of the South known as a glorious expression of American art, summs up sixty years of "discovering the African American musical heritage in this journey through the Mississippi Delta.
Mississippi Blues Today by
The Blues, that unique form of African-American music, continues to hold a fascination with each successive generation of young people. Scots-born Londoner Robert Nicholson is just one such person. Grabbed first as a teenager by the white blues sounds of the Rolling Stones and George Thorogood, he quickly became aware of the real roots of the Blues. Inspired by the great Chicago musicians Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and B. B. King and the Mississippi Blues originators Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton, the author embarked on a journey to trace the roots of the electric sounds of Chicago's Chess record label back to the Mississippi Delta itself, the birthplace of the Blues.Together with Memphis-based photographer, Logan Young, Robert Nicholson has conducted a series of extended field trips to the South. Their travels have brought them into contact with the Blues musicians of today. This book presents in words and images a behind-the-scenes, often intimate, portrait of the main players on the current Delta Blues scene, including Lonnie Pitchford, Booba Barnes, Scott Dunbar, Son Thomas, and others. This important book gives a vivid account of an economically impoverished people and examines the often brittle conviviality, hidden racial tensions, and undercurrents of violence from which the Blues has grown and in which it continues to thrive. The stunning original photographs by Logan Young enhance Nicholson's informative, entertaining, and thought-provoking text. Together they present a unique sociological and musical picture of the Mississippi Blues, and of the ways it has endured and evolved in contemporary America.
Blues All Around Me by
The undisputed king of the blues, B.B. King puts his life into words in a story that spans tragedy, triumph, and everything in between--and he tells it just how he plays it, straight from the heart. A true-to-life tale of overcoming monumental odds to succeed as an artist in an often unfriendly world, Blues All Around Me is also the story of how blues music changed during its migration from the Mississippi Delta to urban areas such as Chicago. Rolling Stone calls B.B.'s memoir a "very American success story [told] with the lyricism and leisurely pace of a born storyteller."
A Place Like Mississippi by
"This is the book all of us Mississippi writers, dead and alive, need to read. It is indeed a strange but glorious sensation to see your literary and geographic lineage so beautifully and rigorously explored and valued as it's still being created." --Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir The South has produced some of America's most celebrated authors, and no state more so than Mississippi. Names as diverse as Faulkner, Welty, and Ward have created a literary legacy spanning decades and stretching across lines of class, gender, and race. One thing binds together these wide- ranging perspectives--the land itself. In A Place Like Mississippi, W. Ralph Eubanks explores those ties and the ways in which the Magnolia State has fostered such a bounty of expression. The stories haven't always been easy to tell; even beautiful landscapes can't obscure a complicated history. The state's African American writers have long recounted the fight for equality, forming a lineage of powerful Black voices that continue to speak with urgency in our tumultuous times. Yet underlying those truths is also a deep affection for Mississippi's places. With the love of a native son, Eubanks pays tribute to the inspiration that can come from the lay of the land, proving that a journey through one state's literary terrain can help us better understand America as a whole
Ever Is a Long Time by
Like the renowned classics Praying for Sheetrock and North Toward Home , Ever Is a Long Time captures the spirit and feel of a small Southern town divided by racism and violence in the midst of the Civil Rights era. Part personal journey, part social and political history, this extraordinary book reveals the burden of Southern history and how that burden is carried even today in the hearts and minds of those who lived through the worst of it.Author Ralph Eubanks, whose father was a black county agent and whose mother was a schoolteacher, grew up on an eighty-acre farm on the outskirts of Mount Olive, Mississippi, a town of great pastoral beauty but also a place where the racial dividing lines were clear and where violence was always lingering in the background. Ever Is a Long Time tells his story against the backdrop of an era when churches were burned, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King were murdered, schools were integrated forcibly, and the state of Mississippi created an agency to spy on its citizens in an effort to maintain white supremacy. Through Eubanks's evocative prose, we see and feel a side of Mississippi that has seldom been seen before. He reveals the complexities of the racial dividing lines at the time and the price many paid for what we now take for granted. With colorful stories that bring that time to life as well as interviews with those who were involved in the spying activities of the State Sovereignty Commission, Ever Is a Long Time is a poignant picture of one man coming to terms with his southern legacy.
The House at the End of the Road by
In defiance of his middle-class landowning family, a young white man named James Morgan Richardson married a lightskinned black woman, Edna Howell. It was 1914 in south Alabama. Together they eventually built a house at the dead end of a road in a rural black community. If you came there to do the Richardson family harm, you faced Jim Richardson's rule of justice, represented by a double-barreled shotgun. And at the end of the road, there was only one way out.The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South examines how one pioneering interracial couple developed a love and a racial identity that carried them defiantly through the Jim Crow years. Through interviews and oral history collected from both sides of the Richardson family's racial divide, as well as archival research, The House at the End of the Road probes into the core of the issue of race in early twentieth-century America. At the same time, it takes the lessons of the past and places them under the scrutiny of a contemporary world adjusted to DNA ancestry testing, a more flexible sense of racial and ethnic identity, and a tolerance and acceptance of the racial ambiguity that laws prohibiting Jim and Edna Richardson's marriage sought to eliminate.Jim and Edna Richardson were Ralph Eubanks's grandparents. Now, decades after interracial marriage became legal, Eubanks takes readers on a journey back to his grandparents' house at the end of the road where he reconstructs their life and times and seeks lessons for America's multiracial future.
Vinegar and Char by
Yes, there is barbecue, but that's just one course of the meal. With Vinegar and Char the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrates twenty years of symposia by offering a collection of poems that are by turns as sophisticated and complex, as vivid and funny, and as buoyant and poignant as any SFA gathering. The roster of contributors includes Natasha Trethewey, Robert Morgan, Atsuro Riley, Adrienne Su, Richard Blanco, Ed Madden, Nikky Finney, Frank X Walker, Sheryl St. Germain, Molly McCully Brown, and forty-five more. These poets represent past, current, and future conversations about what it means to be southern. Throughout the anthology, region is layered with race, class, sexuality, and other shaping identities. With an introduction by Sandra Beasley, a thought-provoking foreword by W. Ralph Eubanks, and luminous original artwork by Julie Sola, this collection is an ideal gift. Meant to be savored slowly or devoured at once, these pages are a perfect way to spend the hour before supper, with a glass of iced tea-or the hour after, with a pour of bourbon-and a fitting celebration of the SFA's focus and community.
"Let the Church Sing!" by
"Let the Church Sing!": Music and Worship in a Black Mississippi Community is based on years of fieldwork by an Irish ethnomusicologist, who examines, in more detail than ever before, how various facets of the Clear Creek citizens' worldview find expression through religious ritual and music. Thérèse Smith, though originally very much an outsider, gradually found herself welcomed into Clear Creek by members and officials of the Clear Creek Missionary Baptist Church. She was permitted to record many hours' worth of sermons and singing and engaged in community events as a participant-observer. In addition, she conducted plentiful interviews, not just at Clear Creek but, for comparison, at Main St. Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky. All of this enables her to analyze in detail how music is interwoven in the worship service, how people feel about the music that they make and hear, and, more generally, how the religious views so vividly expressed help the Church's members think about the relationship between themselves, their community, and the larger world. Music and prayer enable the members and leaders of the Church to bring the realm of the spiritual into intersection with the material world in a particularly active way.The book is enriched by extensive musical transcriptions and an accompanying CD of recordings from actual church services,and these are examined in detail in the book itself.Thérèse Smith is in the Music Department, University College, Dublin.
The Song and the Silence by
In this "beautiful, evocative" (Booklist, starred review) memoir, Yvette Johnson travels to the Mississippi Delta to uncover the moving, true story of her late grandfather Booker Wright, whose extraordinary act of courage would change his and, later, her life forever. "Have to keep that smile," Booker Wright said in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time, Wright was a waiter in a "whites only" restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the Civil Rights Movement. For he did the unthinkable: speaking in front of a national audience, he described what daily life was truly like for black people of Greenwood, Mississippi. Four decades later, Yvette Johnson, Wright's granddaughter, found footage of the controversial documentary. No one in her family knew of his television appearance. Even more curious for Johnson was that for most of her life she'd barely heard mention of her grandfather's name. Born a year after Wright's death and raised in a wealthy San Diego neighborhood, Johnson admits she never had to confront race in the way Southern blacks did in the 1960s. Compelled to learn more about her roots, she travels back to Greenwood, Mississippi, a beautiful Delta town steeped in secrets and a scarred past, to interview family members about the real Booker Wright. As she uncovers her grandfather's compelling and ultimately tragic story, she also confronts her own conflicted feelings surrounding race, family, and forgiveness. "With profound insight and unwavering compassion, Johnson weaves an unforgettable story" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) about her journey in pursuit of her family's past--and ultimately finding a hopeful vision of the future for us all.
River of Song by
Narrated by contemporary folk diva Ani DiFranco, the PBS documentary series "The Mississippi: A River of Song" is a project five years in the making. Working with the Smithsonian and PBS, John Junkerman and Elijah Wald traveled the length of the great muddy river, capturing the scope, the spirit, and the soul of American music at the close of the century. In interviews and performances, they captured more than 500 musicians -- from a punk concert in Minnesota to a rhythm 'n' blues revue in New Orleans, from a bluegrass festival in Illinois to a gospel choir in Mississippi -- performing in the communities that give meaning to their art.
Lanterns on the Levee by
Born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi, within the shelter of old traditions, aristocratic in the best sense, William Alexander Percy in his lifetime (1885--1942) was brought face to face with the convulsions of a changing world. Lanterns on the Levee is his memorial to the South of his youth and young manhood. In describing life in the Mississippi Delta, Percy bridges the interval between the semifeudal South of the 1800s and the anxious South of the early 1940s. The rare qualities of this classic memoir lie not in what Will Percy did in his life -- although his life was exciting and varied -- but rather in the intimate, honest, and soul-probing record of how he brought himself to contemplate unflinchingly a new and unstable era. The 1973 introduction by Walker Percy -- Will's nephew and adopted son -- recalls the strong character and easy grace of "the most extraordinary man I have ever known."
Jim Henson by
For the first time ever--a comprehensive biography of one of the twentieth century's most innovative creative artists: the incomparable, irreplaceable Jim Henson He was a gentle dreamer whose genial bearded visage was recognized around the world, but most people got to know him only through the iconic characters born of his fertile imagination: Kermit the Frog, Bert and Ernie, Miss Piggy, Big Bird. The Muppets made Jim Henson a household name, but they were just part of his remarkable story. This extraordinary biography--written with the generous cooperation of the Henson family--covers the full arc of Henson's all-too-brief life: from his childhood in Leland, Mississippi, through the years of burgeoning fame in America, to the decade of international celebrity that preceded his untimely death at age fifty-three. Drawing on hundreds of hours of new interviews with Henson's family, friends, and closest collaborators, as well as unprecedented access to private family and company archives, Brian Jay Jones explores the creation of the Muppets, Henson's contributions to Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live, and his nearly ten-year campaign to bring The Muppet Show to television. Jones provides the imaginative context for Henson's non-Muppet projects, including the richly imagined worlds of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth--as well as fascinating misfires like Henson's dream of opening an inflatable psychedelic nightclub. An uncommonly intimate portrait, Jim Henson captures all the facets of this American original: the master craftsman who revolutionized the presentation of puppets on television, the savvy businessman whose dealmaking prowess won him a reputation as "the new Walt Disney," and the creative team leader whose collaborative ethos earned him the undying loyalty of everyone who worked for him. Here also is insight into Henson's intensely private personal life: his Christian Science upbringing, his love of fast cars and expensive art, and his weakness for women. Though an optimist by nature, Henson was haunted by the notion that he would not have time to do all the things he wanted to do in life--a fear that his heartbreaking final hours would prove all too well founded. An up-close look at the charmed life of a legend, Jim Henson gives the full measure to a man whose joyful genius transcended age, language, geography, and culture--and continues to beguile audiences worldwide. Praise for Jim Henson "Jim Henson vibrantly delves into the magnificent man and his Muppet methods: It's an absolute must-read!"--Neil Patrick Harris "An exhaustive work that is never exhausting, a credit both to Jones's brisk style and to Henson's exceptional life."--The New York Times "[A] sweeping portrait that is a mix of humor, mirth and poignancy."--Washington Independent Review of Books "A meticulously researched tome chock-full of gems about the Muppets and the most thorough portrait of their creator ever crafted."--Associated Press "Jim was one of my closest friends. And yet I found out things about him in Jim Henson that were new to me. Brian Jay Jones has captured the layers of Jim's genius and humanity, as well as the flaws that made Jim, like all of us, so delightfully imperfect. I thank Brian for giving Jim life again. This book has captured the spirit of Jim Henson."--Frank Oz
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by
In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholarAngela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine. Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle." Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, scholar, author, and speaker. She is an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on Black liberation, prison abolition, the intersections of race, gender, and class, and international solidarity with Palestine. She is the author of several books, includingWomen, Race, and Class andAre Prisons Obsolete? She is the subject of the acclaimed documentaryFree Angela andAll Political Prisoners and is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. One of America's most provocative public intellectuals,Dr. Cornel West has been a champion for racial justice since childhood. His writing, speaking, and teaching weave together the traditions of the black Baptist Church, progressive politics, and jazz.The New York Times has praised his "ferocious moral vision." His many books includeRace Matters,Democracy Matters, and his autobiography,Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. Frank Barat is a human rights activist and author. He was the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine and is now the president of the Palestine Legal Action Network. His books includeGaza in Crisis andCorporate Complicity in Israel's Occupation.
